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Every two years the UK's Oxford Internet Institute does a large scale survey of internet usage in Britain. The full report, which is particularly easy to use on screen, is freely available as an ~80 page PDF [6.3 MB]. Alongside an executive summary and a description of the survey's methodology, the report is in two parts:
- Profiles of users and non-users of the Internet;
- Patterns of Internet use.
Two sections that caught my eye in the "patterns" section were "Creativity and production", and "Learning", and below I reproduce one chart from each section. The first gives an indication that the overall proportion of users who are actively creating content for the Internet remains quite small and is not growing rapidly. The second highlights the extensive use being made of the Internet for learning, especially informal learning.
Click on image to make it intelligible
Click on image to make it intelligible
The report is most definitely useful, and should be required reading for people in policy and strategy roles. That said, I was left slightly dissatisfied by it. In particular it would have been interesting to know the extent to which users are using "flagship" services like Wikipedia. Secondly, some of the specific "facts" established by the survey did seem to lack basic credibility. For example, if ~90% of Internet users use email it does not feel "right" to me, given the proportion of spam originating outside Britain, that only just under 20% if Internet users have been "contacted by someone over the Internet from a foreign country"; or, given the proportion of spam that involves financial fraud, that under 20% have been "contacted by someone online asking you to provide bank details". If readers have views on this issue, please comment below.
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